Movie lengths on average have plateaued since the introduction of the talkie 60 years ago, but the length of the average top 10 movie is up from two hours in 1993 to 2 hours and 23 minutes in 2023.
People making movies also want the product to be shorter. Movie theaters can slot more showings, and sell more tickets, if running times are shorter. They also have more flexibility with scheduling if most movies are about the same length.
We measured 160 English-language films released from 1935 to 2010 and found four changes. First, shot lengths have gotten shorter, a trend also reported by others. Second, contemporary films have more motion and movement than earlier films.
Average length of the top 10 highest-grossing movies in the U.S. & Canada 1980-2023. In 2023, the average length of the top 10 highest-grossing movies in the United States and Canada amounted to 143 minutes (or two hours and 23 minutes). This figure is almost 30 minutes higher than the average recorded in 2020.
Between at-home streaming, strikes in Hollywood that halted film productions, and a pandemic that required would-be moviegoers to stay home, theaters have not had an easy time. Theater chains have closed dozens of theaters in recent years, and, as of last year, ticket sales were still one-third lower than in 2019.
Movies have always been interwoven with media since the 20th century, but the way audiences watched them has changed. Viewers don't have to go to movie theaters anymore now that movies and TV shows are on streaming services or can be illegally pirated at home.
A decline in interest in movies and moviegoing cannot only be attributed to this reliance on franchise films and remakes. COVID-19's impacts have been long-lasting, as regular moviegoers were forced to turn to the very streaming platforms that are being blamed for this decline we are now facing.
I found movies in the 1980s had the shortest average runtime of just 1 hour and 53 minutes, and the 2020s have had the longest average, a full 17 minutes (15%) longer. Now, the 1980s were a significant drop from the 70s, so if you start the count in the 70s, the change has only been 10 minutes (8%) over 5 decades.
Daniel Andersson and Erika Magnusson's experimental Swedish film Logistics answered both questions when it came out in 2012. Logistics is the longest movie of all time, taking a whopping 35 days to end.
For example, Sundance accepts short films of up to 50 minutes. Our festival accepts films up to 45 minutes in length. The film festivals of Locarno, Clermont-Ferrand, and the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) allow 40 minutes for a short film.
Networks maintain a pretty tight schedule, forcing some movies to be shortened on television to allow room for commercial breaks. There are exceptions, for example, ABC used to run extended cuts of the original Harry Potter films, but that is rare.
One longtime producer suspects that fewer test screenings during the pandemic might have contributed to the glut of two-hour-plus films in recent years. “There's nothing better to tell you that your movie is too long than looking at a sea of people who are shifting in their seats,” he says.
In 2019, people bought about 1.2 billion movie tickets. By the time 2023 is done, a little over 800 million tickets will have been sold. That's an improvement over the COVID years. But it's still about a third less — and that's with the gloriously bizarro phenomenon that was Barbenheimer.
Through the decades, top-grossing movie data finds a staggering 19-minute average runtime increase just in the past eleven years. It becomes more objectively noticeable when eight of the ten Best Picture Oscar nominees of 2023 are over two hours in length.
Americans are over lengthy movies, with a new poll finding that moviegoers feel 92 minutes is the ideal length for a film. Americans are over losing their entire afternoon or evening to one film, with only 15% wanting to sit through a movie that's longer than three hours.
Ambiancé was an unreleased experimental film directed by Swedish director Anders Weberg. The film was expected to have a running time of 720 hours (or 30 days) and initially had a projected release date of 31 December 2020.
Logistics or Logistics Art Project is a 2012 experimental art film conceived and created by Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson. At 51,420 minutes (857 hours or 35 days and 17 hours), it is the longest movie ever made.
With a running time of 124 minutes, Disney's Fantasia (1940) remains the longest of the studio's 56 animated features to date, and the only with a running time of over two hours.
It's true that in the first decades of cinema movies were shorter, they were on average 90 minutes long in early 1930s and reached 100–110 minutes in mid-'50s.
The late 1930s and early 1940s are sometimes known as the “Golden Age” of cinema, a time of unparalleled success for the movie industry; by 1939, film was the 11th-largest industry in the United States, and during World War II, when the U.S. economy was once again flourishing, two-thirds of Americans were attending the ...
According to a survey of Americans Gen Z's movie-going habits led in 2022, only three percent of those surveyed said they visit a movie theater one a week or more often.
It's been a rocky road for cinema in recent years. From the booming popularity of SVoD services like Netflix and Amazon Prime creating cut-throat competition, to the Covid-19 lockdowns forcing theatres to close for vast stretches, to the cost-of-living crisis that's driving consumers to tighten their belts.
Cinema is already seeing the adoption of laser projection, the rise of HDR to the Cinema Screen – which Barco showcased at its premiere during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, alongside a massive rise in Virtual Production.
